Starting March 1 this year, the 4 box method was the way to get a decent shipping charge. A couple weeks ago, amazon changed it to the 5 box rule. A little annoying, but still workable.

Today I tried making the same kind of shipment that I have made dozens of times before; some boxes of mixed SKUs, along with enough identical boxes of the same single SKU to qualify for the optimized shipping option. My shipment was no longer eligible for the optimized shipping. After calling amazon support, they told me that to qualify for the optimized shipping, our shipment now has to have multiple categories of items, along with the 5 identical boxes.

This is untenable. We are a hand tools company, we sell hand tools. It's ridiculous that amazon expects us to start selling completely unrelated items just to satisfy their ever increasing regulations simply to not have to pay $40-$50 shipping per box (we never ship more than 50 lbs/box). What are FBA-based companies that focus on selling one category of items going to do? Do we all have to start stocking random items that have nothing to do with our brand? What is amazon's thought process behind this?

Why do I have to ring up amazon support to find out these changes were made? This is something massively impactful and should be on the front page. More importantly, why does the criteria keep changing for how us sellers can achieve the optimized shipping option? Even with the 4/5 box method as a workaround to the March 1 fees, shipping costs have doubled. Now with this change that we need to ship items of multiple categories, I will never again qualify for the "cheap" shipping option.

Has anyone else starting today been impacted by this when trying to ship to FBA?